After being told by the friendly folks of Activision and Luxoflux to have as much beer and food as we would like, we packed ourselves into a conference room in the New York, New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas to give the upcoming Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen video game a shot.

After a quick tutorial mission to learn the controls where we played as Blackout (Decepticon helicopter), sent to an industrial building site for performance evaluation by new Decepticon leader Starscream, we were off to terrorize the people of Earth in actual game missions.

Flowing right out of the tutorial, the first mission pitted Blackout on a search for four engineers to learn the location of Mikaela so the Decepticons could kidnap her. We were told the majority of the single player portion of “Revenge of the Fallen” closely follows the narrative of the feature film, with a few creative liberties taken, much like how most video game-to-film adaptations are handled. Therefore, it;s likely the Decepticons will kidnap Sam Witwicky’s super hot girlfriend at some point in the film. We have no idea what their reasons for doing so are, but one can imagine any sentient being could spend days just staring at Megan Fox and be satisfied. So we understand, and to a degree support, the Decepticon’s devious plan.

The second mission we were able to play let us finally take control of Optimus Prime at a construction site. The level started out easy enough, having us kill five Decepticon minions with Optimus’ secondary weaponry before moving onto the meat of the mission: a one-on-one showdown with one of the Constructicons, Demolishor. For those curious who Demolishor is, youâ€™ve already seen him during a number of the film’s trailers. He is the gigantic robot with the huge single wheel at its base. Until this point it was unconfirmed exactly who that was, but this demo confirmed his identity. And for those avoiding spoilers, turn awayâ€¦

[Spoiler Warning]

The fight is over when Optimus pumps a bullet into the head of Demolishor.

[Spoiler Ends]

This second level as Optimus was far more kick-ass, mostly because he has some really badass weaponry – dual rifles, chargeable spinning blades, as well as his wrist swords that we’ve already seen in the first film. However, before the fight with Demolishor, the Optimus level had some fairly weak level design, which I fear might be the case for a lot of the single player missions in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Objectives that seem rather meaningless and are simply included to extend play time of the game by a few hours but don’t really add anything to the overall narrative.

But even after finishing the two levels we were shown, we still had an itch to play more of the game to get a better feel for what Luxoflux is doing with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, quibbles about level design aside. So that’s a very good sign. And although the plot will basically be a recounting of the film, being able to transform on the fly is so exhilarating that it practically makes the game worth a try just to experience that rush.

And if you’re interested in how well the multiplayer portion of the game plays, head on over to CraveOnline to read the full impressions.